Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Apr 2016
352 pages
Genre: Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Publication Information
"Brilliant. Nothing but." - Ben Fountain, author of Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk
At the bitter end of the 1960s, after surviving multiple assassination attempts, President John F. Kennedy has created a vast federal agency, the Psych Corps, dedicated to maintaining the nation's mental hygiene by any means necessary. Soldiers returning from Vietnam have their battlefield traumas "enfolded" - wiped from their memories through drugs and therapy - while veterans too damaged to be enfolded roam at will in Michigan, evading the Psych Corps and reenacting atrocities on civilians.
This destabilized, alternate version of American history is the vision of the twenty-two-year-old veteran Eugene Allen, who has returned from Vietnam to write the book at the center of Hystopia, the long-awaited first novel by David Means. The critic James Wood has written that Means's language "offers an exquisitely precise and sensuous register of an often crazy American reality." In Hystopia, Means brings his full talent to bear on the crazy reality of trauma, both national and personal. Outlandish and tender, funny and violent, timely and historical, Hystopia invites us to consider whether our traumas can ever be truly overcome. The answers it offers are wildly inventive, deeply rooted in its characters, and wrung from the author's own heart.
"Starred Review. [Hystopia] reads like an acid flashback, complete with the paranoia, manic monologues, and violent visions, proving that some traumas never go away." - Publishers Weekly
"Starred Review. [David Means's] work is precise, relentless, unsentimental, an art of missed opportunities and missed connections, tracing, more than anything, the inevitability of loss... Means' first novel is a compelling portrait of an imagined counterhistory that feels entirely real." - Kirkus
"Hystopia is a thrilling novel - daring, immensely readable, and also unexpectedly funny. David Means is that lucky (and brilliant) writer: a man in full possession of a vision." - Richard Ford
"For every politician who launches a misbegotten war, there is a writer who says kaddish. The Edgar Allan Poe who went to West Point would have admired this ghost-haunted book. More: he would have comprehended its liminality." - Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya, author of The Watch
"Terrifying and beautiful, Hystopia defies every evasion or sentimentality in its resolute evocation of a history our culture so readily avoids. Robert Stone would be proud." - Christian G. Appy, Professor of History, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and author of American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity
"A riveting, hypnotic dystopia of Vietnam combat veterans during the (fictional) second JFK administration. Amazing writing - not for the faint of heart. Nuggets of beauty glowing in a pan of pain." - Jonathan Shay, M.D., Ph.D., author of Achilles in Vietnam and Odysseus in America
"Brilliant. Nothing but. Hystopia goes straight to the heart of the American darkness, that most strange and twisted place where our wars, those perfect storms of high-tech mayhem and idiot blunder, cohabit with what we love to advertise as our virtue, our freedoms, our God-blessed mission to save the world." - Ben Fountain, author of Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk.
This information about Hystopia was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Phtot: Beowulf Sheehan
David Means is the author of several story collections, including Assorted Fire Events, The Spot, The Secret Goldfish, and Instructions for a Funeral. His novel, Hystopia, was nominated for the Man Booker Prize.
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